Hoarders Ruins Doctoral Student’s Life

Peeples returned from a staff retreat to find her entire collection of dissertation materials gone.

A well-intentioned intervention by a University of Duckett doctoral student’s domestic partner resulted in devastation this week. Victoria Peeples’ partner, Kerry Dowling, contacted the popular A&E reality show Hoarders as a surprise for Peeples.

“She’s been working so hard on her dissertation,” said Dowling. “Her office wasn’t fit for human consumption. I don’t know how she could focus or get any work done in that room. I knew that Dr. Z would be able to help.”

The crew of the show, including Dr. Robin Zasio, arrived at the house prepared to remove the hoard and provide cognitive therapy to Peeples.

“She had some sort of off-campus staff retreat for her graduate assistantship,” said Dowling. “We went ahead and did this anyway as a gift to her. The junk clearing crew and I went through all of the stuff ourselves and made quick decisions about what to keep.”

More than 300 pounds of debris were removed from Peeples’ home office over the course of two days.

Peeples returned from the retreat to find all of the books and articles she had gathered for the literature review portion of her dissertation gone.

“What my idiot partner thought was garbage was actually the hundreds of hours’ worth my research for my lit review,” said Peeples. “Not only do I have to start over gathering the information, but I owe thousands of dollars in book replacement costs to Duckett’s library.”

“We thought it was a useless little metal box. When we couldn’t crack it open, it went into the trash heap,” said Dowling.

“The good news is that they saved the tower of Mountain Dew cans from my late night caffeine bingeing,” said Peeples with sarcasm. “I guess turning those in for the ten cent deposit will be just as good as the salary increase that my doctoral degree would have brought.”

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